Section 255 of the Communications Act, as amended by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, requires that cell phone manufacturers and service providers do all that is “readily achievable” to make each product or service accessible. Although, there are tons of “smart” phones with millions of features on the market, there is still no single phone designed specifically for blind and visually impaired people. Smartphones require touching and looking on screen to manage the phone book, which is difficult for visually impaired people. While some smartphones do have limited support for visually impaired people, such device are typically very expensive as they include touchscreens, cameras, etc., many components of which are of little to no use to the visually impaired. As a result, visually impaired users end up paying for tons of features that are not used. Furthermore, almost all smartphones have challenges with voice recognition accuracy, accents, and specific words.
The prevalent use of smartphones has also led to an increase in the number of people texting and driving. Texting and driving is dangerous, as in the United States alone over 5,000 drivers die each year due to an accident involving texting. This a major area of concern for many parents, especially those of children just learning to drive. Apart from the dangers of texting and driving, more and more parents want to give their kids simple phone where they can simply make a call to check how their kid is doing without fear that an expensive phone can be broken, lost or that their kid will get addicted to games on a smartphone. Many parents do not feel that their child is responsible yet for an expensive phone, or fear that their child will get addicted to technology but still want to be able to communicate with their child.
As previously mentioned, most smartphones are expensive devices. Not only are smartphone expensive, but they are also very fragile and prone to breaking easily. As such, cases and screen protectors are often used to protect smartphones from being dropped, scratched, etc. Some cases are even designed to prevent water damage, which smartphone are very susceptible to. Such cases and screen protectors are often expensive accessories, thus further increasing the cost of owning a smartphone. In addition to having fragile components, smartphones also often deal with battery issues, as large amounts of energy are consumed in order to power the components, such as the touchscreen and backlights.
Therefore it is the object of the present invention to provide a voice only phone and a method for operating the voice only phone using an interactive virtual respondent (IVR). The voice only phone is simplistic in nature, having no touchscreen and only one external control button in the form of an activation switch. The IVR allows a user to interact with the voice only phone to place calls, receive calls, receive text messages, and respond to text messages using only voice commands. Furthermore, the IVR allows for the dynamic creation of a voice phone book that is progressively updated. In order to better recognize the voice of the user, the voice only phone creates a voice profile through a voice recognition setup sequence, wherein the user is prompted to dictate a plurality of audible calibration inputs. Once the voice profile is created, the user is able to place phone calls by either dictating a contact name or a plurality of digits for a phone number.